The Onion is prophetic:I always play female toons, because I prefer that eye-candy over watching some buff dude all the time. Guess I'm farked.

csb:

Whenever I play an MMORPG, I always make one redheaded female human character. It's a tradition. More than 10 years ago, Dark Age of Camelot came out. My first character was a Scout. It was ok, but I thought it really needed a pet. So then I made a Hunter, which was like a Scout but had a pet, but I thought the pet was great but too squishy. Then I made a Druid, which was a healer with a pet. I loved that class. I hadn't expected to, so I had just randomly chosen its appearance. It was a redheaded Celt(human) female, but I stuck with it. Eventually, I moved on to newer games, but I always make a redheaded human female as a tribute to that awesome character. These days I'm casually playing GW2 and I have a redheaded female human Thief.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

And if you play a Tauren in WoW or a Charr in GW2, you're a latent furry?

As luck would have it, this is generally the default. I've never given a crap about Sims-type frills like customizing appearances, decorating a house, trophy cases, etc.

With the advent of more complex RPGs, they are generallly worth a second play through to get the alternate story line content. So using the same lazy methodology, I pretty much started just creating the opposite character for a second playthrough: A flamboyant evil female.

So what does it mean when one's avatar is an often-furry shapeshifter? Because I've lost a little weight, but I attribute that to a change in diet and activity levels, not a predilection for slender cheetahs and border collies.

(Actually, the only real effect, I think, is that nobody can form a real mental picture of the real-world me based on my pixel appearance. I like it that way.)

Yeah, usually I play most games as a black women with green eyes and a bob haircut. That's about as far from my actual appearance as you can possibly get.

I never really play SL, but I do have an avatar. Back when my wife was in college she had a class that convened in SL. Her digital media professor was on a mission to see how little he could do and still get paid. This was back in the day when you could still buy guns that would grief the hell out of people. I had the whole class in orbit with giant dongs stuck to their head in no time at all. I met her professor in person at graduation. He was far from being mad, he thought it was pretty hilarious.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm a gay male and I usually play hot, muscular, manly men avatars because I like to play my video game and masturbate at the same time.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm a gay male and I usually play hot, muscular, manly men avatars because I like to play my video game and masturbate at the same time.

Such truth. If I were gay and into pixels I'd have male avatars for eye candy. I've got all female avatars.

Flirting with, and having cybersex with male characters in games is what makes me gay, not my female Avatar, and technically I'm simply a trap, not a queermo.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm a gay male and I usually play hot, muscular, manly men avatars because I like to play my video game and masturbate at the same time.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

Sorry, looking at troll-ass for 8 hours at a stretch is just not my thing.

Well first of all 249 people is generally considered way to small a sample population to draw any real conclusions in a psychological or sociological study.

Second, what was the control population? Was there a group of hot skinny people who made fatty avatars and were overcome with the urge to move back into their parent's basements to sit on the couch and eat hot pockets?

Third, it's a game. As a gamer I'm so sick of doctors and psychologists and "experts" trying to analyze/demonize/whateverize gamers. Hate to tell you this, but lots of people just play video games for fun. Not so that they can have skinny avatars that encourage them to lose weight while they're cyber-stalking the neighbor's cat and preparing for the zombie apocalypse by stocking up on gold coins and diamonds.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm a gay male and I usually play hot, muscular, manly men avatars because I like to play my video game and masturbate at the same time.

Such truth. If I were gay and into pixels I'd have male avatars for eye candy. I've got all female avatars.

Flirting with, and having cybersex with male characters in games is what makes me gay, not my female Avatar, and technically I'm simply a trap, not a queermo.

/but I have sucked dick before so...//Sexuality is confusing...

As a Second Life neko-trap who is at this very moment dragging some human ponies around who tend to sport tits AND a wing-wong, I'm getting a kick out of these replies....

cgraves67:The Onion is prophetic: I always play female toons, because I prefer that eye-candy over watching some buff dude all the time. Guess I'm farked.

csb:

Whenever I play an MMORPG, I always make one redheaded female human character. It's a tradition. More than 10 years ago, Dark Age of Camelot came out. My first character was a Scout. It was ok, but I thought it really needed a pet. So then I made a Hunter, which was like a Scout but had a pet, but I thought the pet was great but too squishy. Then I made a Druid, which was a healer with a pet. I loved that class. I hadn't expected to, so I had just randomly chosen its appearance. It was a redheaded Celt(human) female, but I stuck with it. Eventually, I moved on to newer games, but I always make a redheaded human female as a tribute to that awesome character. These days I'm casually playing GW2 and I have a redheaded female human Thief.

That's funny -- years ago I was playing UO on a private shard and grabbed a haircut. They hadn't implemented it right so they had to get the DMs to switch your hairstyle. By accident they gave me a short bright red haircut, which by astonishing coincidence was my hair colour at the time (RGB FF0000, it was 1999 give me a break.) I kept it and it just kept going as a long-time running gag. (Though not in real life, that would get expensive) "There's the rogue with the red hair..." and nobody could catch me despite everyone knowing who I was. (I had one of the first cable modems, so I could routinely outrun people on horseback.)

Ever since then I've tried to play a character with red hair, bright red. Or if that's not possible as red an outfit as I can find. (My X-Com team is all in colour 6, and they're all wearing helmets. I know that the helmets don't do anything but seriously, put on a helmet you asshole.)

I usually play stealth characters, I guess I feel like nobody notices I'm around. That's probably truer than I'd like to admit.

I'm guilty of this in Fallout (3 and New Vegas). The character generators comes surprisingly close to my actual face, so I end up with several variations on me. Good Me ridding the Wasteland of bad guys, Evil Me finding people who live alone and taking a flamethrower to them, Morally Ambiguous Me stealing everything he can get his hands on and obsessively piling all the kitchenware in the world at the bottom of a convenient gulch.

Any male gamer who plays a female character is a latent homosexual. Just stop playing, put on your tightest leather, and head down to the docks. You'll feel much better about yourself in the long run. And don't get me started on the "I'd rather look at a female body than a male body" argument - YOU'RE GAY!! ACCEPT IT AND MOVE ON!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm a gay male and I usually play hot, muscular, manly men avatars because I like to play my video game and masturbate at the same time.

I suspect Captain Kickass is confusing being gay with being transgender. I could be wrong, but I think we may be dealing with that level of derp here.

Do you remember Jodie Dallas (Billy Crystal) in Soap? That might be before your time. He wore a dress some of the time. That was what the popular conception of homosexuality was in 1970s America. Some people are still stuck in that decade.